The African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial Strategies by Christopher Morton & Darren Newbury

Author:Christopher Morton & Darren Newbury [Christopher Morton and Darren Newbury]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472591265
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

Everybody’s photographers

In the early 1990s the contemporary photographer Santu Mofokeng began compiling images for ‘The Black Photo Album/ Look at Me: 1890–1950’. 4 His project emerged in part from a desire to present an alternative recollection, a counter-archive of black experience during the colonial period. Mofokeng recovered and re-photographed cabinet card portraits of middle-class black sitters from before the mid-twentieth century, objects that had been mostly buried in private family collections. From this he created an 80-slide installation alternating the images and commentary texts, bringing to light what at that point had been a repressed history of the image world of the black middle class in South Africa. My own current project, very much in the same spirit, has been to ask what happened after 1950. Did this tradition of bourgeois portraiture continue or was it replaced by other forms? For the past several years I have been visiting homes, mostly in Soweto, and asking the families of close friends what kinds of pictures they made of themselves, for themselves, during the apartheid years. What I have discovered, contrary to most writing on the subject, is that it was not only white-run studios in town that produced portrait images.

By at least the 1950s there were camera enthusiasts in the black community, some of whom made a small living going door to door on holidays making images of people in their homes, and many of whom set up small studios in the commercial districts in the native locations. I have found that almost every neighbourhood had at least one such studio in its commercial district by the 1960s and that these were popular places for residents to record images of themselves. As I went house to house, I began noticing that the reverse of most older images in family collections held a photographer’s stamp, and from the names and locations, it quickly became clear that there was a whole category of black photographers whose work had been overlooked by South African photographic historians. An early example is a lounge photograph dating from the early 1940s that was shown to me by an elderly gentleman, Eric Gorrey (Figures 7.1 and 7.2 ). The Gorrey family had been forcibly removed from the mixed-race suburb of Sophiatown in the 1950s, to the so-called ‘coloured’ township of Riverlea. Here as a small boy he poses with his parents and sister, their tea set, and a neighbour in the parlour of their Sophiatown home. Also note the oval portrait on the wall, a subject I will return to shortly. The business stamp on the reverse indicates that the image was made by a Mr J. Z. Nqadolo, proprietor of the local establishment ‘Everybody’s Photographer’, a business name subtly at odds with the policy of separateness then being enforced by the South African government. Sophie Feyder has found that this type of portrait-with-interior was also made later, during the 1950s, by Ronald Ngilima who often used his own home in Wattville on the East Rand as the backdrop (Feyder 2012, see also this volume).

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